Picasso
When we lived in Venezuela, most of the people in the American community who were Catholic attended one particular church. It was a Venezuelan Catholic church, but the bulk of its congregation consisted of Americans who worked for the oil companies. The kids were remanded to catechism classes, which pretty much amounted to brainwashing sessions about the nature of god, the universe, and all that. God is everywhere, God is good, God’s word is gospel.And when you die, you’re going to be judged as hopeless, maybe salvageable, or yes, you made the grade.
I remember siting there in this class and thinking that it was all wrong, that what happened when we died was what we believed would happen. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and confess sins that I made up and do penances for things I hadn’t done, and I mean, please, Eve tempted Adam with a silly apple? Are you kidding me?
In all fairness to the Catholic church, I agreed with the previous pope about the immorality of the Iraq war. But that’s about the only area where I agree with the church. Most religions seems to have a vested interest in encouraging us to believe we’ve got one life to get it right, that some archangel or god will be sitting in judgment of what we have have done – or not done; what we have achieved – or not achieved; that some angry god may decide to sideline us somewhere till we tow the line.
Sounds like politicians, right? But if you look at the literature about near death experiences, you find something quite different from what most Christian religions preach.Tonight, rewriting the ultimate journey section in our book, here’s what I found – and mined:
The irony of dismissing anecdotes as valid, as proof, is that anecdotes are the only things we have at this point in scientific explorations of NDEs. Ask Raymond Moody, whose 1975 book Life After Life is a compilation of more than 100 stories from people who were declared clinically dead and were subsequently resuscitated. Moody’s book stamped the word near-death experience on the collective consciousness.
Two of the personal experiences that follow were left as comments on our blog. The last story was told to us by a friend. Each experiences is different, but there are certainly common factors.
Yet, she felt no awareness of her physical distress. “It was pure bliss. I stopped looking at what was happening below me and felt myself gliding away from that room, farther and farther. I didn’t pass through a tunnel, exactly. It was more as if I stepped through a door or a gate onto a kind of brightly-lit path or beam that seemed to be tugging me towards the most brilliant spectrum of colors, indescribable. I was so eager to reach those colors. But a voice, coming from someone I didn’t see, very clearly said to me, Connie, you can’t stay here. You have a new little boy to raise, and two more little boys coming. You have to go back.”
But Connie had no desire to go back.She was infused with such comfort and peace and joy that she felt angry that something seemed to be relentlessly pulling her back. She looked down and was in the room again, then very suddenly, with a severe jolt that seemed like an electrical shock, she was back in that ravaged body.
“The code team was ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I spent thirty-one days in what was then an ICU unit. It was written in my chart that for six minutes I had flatlined, with no cerebral activity and no pulse. I was dead, not “nearly dead”, as the so-called experts call it. There are no words in any language that can adequately describe the experience of being dead.“
Vicki D drowned at the age of sixteen. “I drifted up and saw myself lying on the beach as they administered CPR. Someone was behind me and kept asking me different questions. I remember feeling so peaceful and warm until the voice behind me told me to look closer at the girl on the beach and I slowly realized she looked like me, and then BAM!
During the birth of her first child, Renie Wiley died. She remembers drifting up toward the ceiling and watching the doctors as they tried to resuscitate her. Certain information was available to her in that state and she realized that her primary doctor was going to be shipped off to Vietnam and that he wouldn’t return.
When he brought her back into the world of the living, she described what she had experienced. She told him what she’d seen for him and begged him not to volunteer. He was shocked. No one knew that he had applied as a medic in Vietnam. And she was also right. He was killed in Vietnam.
To those who think NDEs are not real until proven in a laboratory, it just doesn’t work that way. I have never had one, but before my mother died I had spent about the last month in her hospital room. The rest of my family came and went, but I was on vacation and could stay with her. Even my wife couldn’t spend as much time as she wanted to as she had to take care of our three young children. The last days she was moved the 100 miles back to our home town so my wife, one sister-in-law and I were with her the night she died. I was exhausted from lack of sleep so I crawled under her bed and went to sleep. I awoke the very moment she was taking her final breath.
Ray
For those who don’t already know this, the Hospice medical caregivers are given instructions, when we accept the position, to allow patients to share any and every feeling, thought, fear, apprehension, experience, whatever, with us, and to never deny their experiences, whatever they may be. I cannot count the many, many patients for whom I was caring who, as they approached the final hours of life and were even comatose, would have conversations with “people” that they could see and hear but who most others around them could not. Often a comatose patient would rouse at the very moment of transition and would joyfully speak to a loved one who was already on the Other Side. I had a young woman with breast cancer who opened her physical eyes from just such a comatose circumstance, and lifted her arms upward crying out,”Mama!” with the most beatific smile on her face! Her husband prompted everyone to look at that smile, and when the funeral home ambulance arrived for the body of his wife, he told them that when they prepared her for viewing, “don’t take that smile from her face”! I sat in my car afterwards and simply sobbed with joy that this patient, whom I had clinically attended for several months, was at last free of pain and that her “Mama” had come for her. Chills, still, whenever I remember these precious moments.
Great story, math!
Eloquent post, and fascinating comments as well……thanks! I attend a NDE group here, although I have never had one myself (but lots of “ghost” stories). I’m a mask artist, and I just made a mask of Isis, and wrote recently about the Egyptian underworld goddess Maat, the one who stands at the portal and asks her questions of each soul. And today a colleague called and told me she’s been feeling she needs to do a performance piece about the Egyptian goddess Nephrys, also a “death” goddess. So, in my little archetypally inclined society at least, these ideas seem to be coming up.
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Just love your masks. Do you have Nephrys poted??
Thank you, Karena! I’m glad I’m still here, too, and happy to be able to share some stories from my very weird life! Trish, as a person who has spent decades studying Egypt cryptography, I do believe the header is a depiction of “crossing the River Styx”, which the Nile was often called in ancient Egypt and also in Camelot when King Arthur was placed on his bier and his knights gently pushed his burning boat, with him upon it, into the river. The boat in your picture is Egyptian, and the central symbol is from the head-dress of the Goddess ISIS, goddess of life and fertility. She is considered to be the physical personification of eternal life. Sometimes small boats such as these were placed in the tombs of the pharaohs to assist them in their crossings from this world to the next. Your title of this post, AFTER, carries so very many interpretations as well as NDEs. So often throughout our journeys in the body we have experiences that are “little deaths” of one kind or another, even though as we experience them, we may not recognize them as such, as we leave behind us those things and/or people that no longer serve our purpose, and move forward into a new, different space and frequency. I had a second NDE, also caused by a massive hemorrhage, just prior to cancer surgery. It was recorded in my chart as “clinical death”, and again there were units of blood being pushed into me rapidly. During that one, which was much more recent, I watched the code team frantically attempting to pull me back, and I felt a really strange kind of “separation” from this body, as if I simply didn’t belong in it and had no desire whatsoever to return to it. Something drew my attention away from the scene around the gurney and all that blood, and I turned to see a “pinpoint” of brilliant Light in the distance. I began to move towards that Light, and between the Light and me appeared a shimmering lake of very still water….the most exquisite, crystal clear water that had reflections of rainbow prisms in it. Someone said to me, “Step into the water, Connie”, and I did. I didn’t notice what I looked like, but I immersed myself up to my breasts in that crystal water. When I did that, three white doves circled over my head, and one of them descended and perched momentarily on my right shoulder. It brought a sensation of utter rapture I will never, ever forget as long as I live. I’ve never forgotten that I was afraid to move; I was afraid if I moved, the dove would fly away. But then suddenly there was a terrible spasm of jerking and falling, and I crashed back into this body. In all honesty, I don’t think I have been completely “aligned” in it since the event occurred. Just as an aside, I had been given no medications or drugs that would have induced a hallucination. According to the chart, the attending physician had already pronounced me when I jolted back in and he was preparing to tell my family. One of my nurses confided to me later that I had “scared the beejeebies out of the code team” because they “knew” I was beyond retrieving. All NDEs have certain things in common, and most of them have individual experiences woven into them that we fear trying to reveal because of the skepticim. But I KNOW death does not exist. I KNOW there is something of us, individually, that continues when these fragile rags of skin we are wearing are shed, and it is nothing to fear. Certainly I’m not ready to go, (again and finally), but do I fear it? Absolutely Not! Been there, and it’s unspeakably beautiful.
Re:
“… in The Conscious Universe, where he lumps apparitions, hauntings, OBEs, and NDEs under the same iffy category. “Because almost all the evidence for these phenomena comes from uncontrolled, spontaneous cases – and thus was necessarily collected as after-the-fact anecdotes rather than as controlled laboratory results”
Well then,how does science measure a thought,tell us how it comes into being,and just what makes or controls those thoughts …which is consciousness ?
Maybe the whole “Conscious Universe” has to go into the iffy category,if they can’t solve that riddle ? -)
P.S. I still think Dean Radin ROCKS !!! Even if his above comment was a little left fieldish.
Now you are talking my language! The subject nearest and dearest to my heart. I loved this post. Thank You. ♥ ♥ One each.
First.. I’d like to say that I’m glad Connie is still around after her experience…I enjoy here comments here. And I wish more was being studied about NDE…
I like the new blog….the header especially Looks great.
the header is sort of appropriate for this pot! I think it’s an egyptian boat crossing The River Styx.
I did hear that some group has put symbols on shelves high up in ER rooms so that they can ask if anyone has seen the symbols during their near death experience. Most say that they hover near the ceiling and might be able to accurately describe what has taken place, but as far as I know, no one has seen the symbols yet.
Symbols? Wow. I would think photos or paintings or something really visual would be easier to see during an NDE. Intriguing, though, that people are trying different things.
Some things have to be lived to be believed. But then, a scientist might write his own experience off as brain chemistry.
I have lived through a near death experience as well. First,I tried to talk to my daughter, then I saw a glimpse the future of America, finally I was in a very peaceful space.
Future of America? Uh-oh. Can you elaborate, Debra???
It’s complex. There were West coast Mountains that became islands. The electrical grid did not exist on on a world level. The internet did not exist on a world level. There were groups of “bohemians” that were hiding out in wild places (woods etc) because they were the result of genetic experiments prior to The Crash/ The Event. They were supposed to be “exterminated” but someone took mercy on them and adopted them instead.
It’s very scifi.
Parts of it sound like A World Made by Hand, a novel that terrified me because it seems so plausible!
The setting was very like “A World Made by Hand”. Just add a population of laboratory made human genetic anomalies.
I loved the follow-up to A World Made By Hand-
“The Witch of Hebron’.
You’re way ahead of me, Debra. I’m inthe midst of witch, the 3rd larrson book, and the hidden reality. Need a lifetime just to read!
I first started my spiritual path by reading Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s books in the mid ’70’s. My grandmother had the same experience in a dental chair where she had been given too much epinephrin. It does change everything, doesn’t it? Moody has another film coming out soon, and I’ve heard Life After Life is a good one. I’ve read most of his books. He’s a true pioneer.
Moody really is a true pioneer. Wow about the dental chair and your grandmother, nancy!
i was fortunate enough to meet elizabeth kubler ross at one of her seminars way back when – many moons ago – was so taken with her work in death and dying – brilliant woman with great spirit – and moody – who has not read him!
Lucky you. Would love to have met her, Gypsy.
Great stories and convincing ones too. There was an article in the UK press recently about some professor who reckoned he could replicate NDEs in the lab – but ‘they’ always want answers that comply with their ready made beliefs. I don’t doubt NDEs, though I’ve never had one myself – we live on.
I think your new blog looks good, nice and clean, interesting header.
Good luck, fingers crossed – Mike.
Thanks, Mike! Fingers and toes crossed! I saw that article in the UK press. Kinda weird, trying to replicate NDEs in a lab!
That header is from Jung’s red book. Sort of Egyptian, oh well! I kind of wonder if this is meant to depict crossing the River Styx in the afterlife.
what stories! great post – and what an image! not a picasso with which i’m familiar –
Hey friend of Nica! Not done yet!